STILL HAVEN’T FOUND WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR?

Galway, four years on

Governmental organisations regularly abuse the word ‘legacy’, dropping it into all kinds of situations. We’ve been told that the London Olympics have to leave a legacy for East London for example. It is the idea that something tangible gets left behind when something else has long gone, and can be good or bad.

It was hard to imagine at the time of shooting ‘Watching & Waiting’ in the 20th Galway Film Fleadh that there would be any kind of legacy attached to it, and we certainly never spoke of one. Put aside the subsequent adventures of 72 hour filmmaking, this year at Galway will see one very tangible development from that event four years ago.

Whilst it is fair to say that Andy Paton, John Bradburn and I had been developing a postgraduate filmmaking degree in the months preceding the Fleadh in 2008, it had not found its feet. In the process of making the 72 hour film in Ireland, the producer Conor Murphy spotted the potential for developing such a course in Dublin to encourage feature filmmaking. Flash forward four years, and his vision paid off. The students of the MSc in Digital Feature Film Production are about to screen their feature, Keys To The City, in Galway this Thursday. It’s an exciting time.

It’s rewarding to feel that the process of collaborating on the 72 project opened the door up to do something more substantial, which has given more people more opportunities. Galway in 2008 was my first experience of screening at a festival and I can honestly say that I had no idea that it would take me around the world and working with some wonderful people. I wonder where their first festival experience will take them, and where will they be in four years?